Chapter 8. Padding, Borders, and Margins

Chapter 8. Padding, Borders, and Margins

If you're like the vast majority of web designers,
your pages all use tables for layout. You design them this way
because, of course, tables can be used to create sidebars and to set
up a complicated structure for an entire page's
appearance. You might even use tables for simpler tasks, like putting
text in a colored box with a border. When you think about it, though,
you shouldn't need a table for such simple tasks. If
you want only a paragraph with a red border and a yellow background,
shouldn't creating it be easier than wrapping a
single-cell table around it?

The authors of CSS felt it should, indeed, be easier, so they devoted
a great deal of attention to allowing you to define
borders for
paragraphs, headings, divs, anchors,
images—darned near everything a web page can contain. These
borders can set an element apart from others, accentuate its
appearance, mark certain kinds of data as having been changed, or any
number of other things.